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Comment by wewtyflakes | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like it would be a lot of churn for nothing; if they can fund a fork, then they could fund the original project, no?

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They COULD, but history has shown they would rather start and maintain their own fork.

It might not make sense morally, but it makes total sense from a business perspective… if they are going to pay for the development, they are going to want to maintain control.

If they want that level of control, reimburse for all the prior development too. - ie: buy that business.

As it stands, they're just abusing someone's gift.

Like jerks.

There should be a "if you use this product in a for-profit environment, and you have a yearly revenue of $500,000,000,000+ ... you can afford to pay X * 100,000/yr" license.

That's the Llama license and yeah, a lot of people prefer this approach, but many don't consider it open source. I don't either.

In fact, we are probably just really lucky that some early programmers were kooky believers in the free software philosophy. Thank God for them. So much of what I do owes to the resulting ecosystem that was built back then.

I reckon this is an impedance mismatch between "Open Source Advocacy" and Open Source as a programming hobby/lifestyle/itch-to-scratch that drives people to write and release code as Open Source (of whatever flavour they choose, even if FSS and/or OSF don't consider that license to qualify as "Open Source").

I think Stallmann's ideological "allowing users to run, modify, and share the software without restrictions" stance is good, but I think for me at least that should apply to "users" as human persons, and doesn't necessarily apply to "corporate personhood" and other non-human "users". I don't see a good way to make that distinction work in practice, but I think it's something that if going to become more and more problematic as time goes on, and LLM slop contributions and bug reports somehow feed into this too.

I was watching MongoDB and Redis Labs experiments with non-OSF approved licences clearly targeted at AWS "abusing" those projects, but sadly neither of those cases seemed to work out in the long term. Also sadly, I do not have any suggestions of how to help...

There is also the AGPL.

I always like to point out that "Open Source" was a deliberate watering-down of the moralizing messaging of Free Software to try and sell businesses on the benefits of developing software in the open.

> We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape.

https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...

I like FS, but it's always had kind of nebulous morality, though. It lumps in humans with companies, which cannot have morals, under the blanket term "users".

This is the same tortured logic as Citizens United and Santa Clara Co vs Southern Pacific Railroad, but applied to FS freedoms instead of corporate personhood and the 1st Amendment.

I like the FS' freedoms, but I favor economic justice more, and existing FS licenses don't support that well in the 21st c. This is why we get articles like this every month about deep-pocketed corporate free riders.

Agree in some ways. Still, discussing the nitty gritty is superfluous, the important underlying message you are making is more existential.

Open source software is critical infrastructure at this point. Maintainers should be helped out, at least by their largest users. If free riding continues, and maintainers' burden becomes too large, supply chain attacks are bound to happen.

> Agree in some ways. Still, discussing the nitty gritty is superfluous, the important underlying message you are making is more existential.

It's an important conversation to have.

I remember a particular developer...I'll be honest, I remember his name, but I remember him being a pretty controversial figure here, so I'll pretend not to know them to avoid reflexive downvotes...but this developer made a particular argument that I always felt was compelling.

> If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you. If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business.

The developer meant this in the context of preferring the GPL as a license, but the problem with the GPL is that it still treats all comers equally. It's very possible for a corporation to fork a GPL project and simply crush the original project by throwing warm bodies at their projects.

Such a project no longer represents the interests of the free software community as a whole, but its maintainers specifically. I also think that this can apply to projects that are alternatives to popular GPL projects, except for the license being permissive.

We need to revisit the four freedoms, because I no longer think they are fit for purpose.

Do they want control or do they really want something that works that they don't have to worry about?

The only reason for needing control would be if it was part of their secret sauce and at that point they can fork it and fuck off.

These companies should be heavily shamed for leaching off the goodwill of the OSS community.

If they can fund a fork, they can continue business as usual until the need arises

A fork is more expensive to maintain than funding/contributing to the original project. You have to duplicate all future work yourselves, third party code starts expecting their version instead of your version, etc.

Nobody said the fork cannot diverge from the original project.

Funding ffmpeg also essentially funds their competitors, but a closed fork in-house doesn't. Submitting bugs costs less than both, hence why they still use ffmpeg in the first place.

With a bit of needless work the fixes could be copied and they would still end up funding them.

They can't - it's LGPL 2.1. So the fork would be public essentially.

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